My challenge for 2015: try something new every day for a whole year.

Day 86 – trinity of “firsts”

Although I feel like today has been a pretty standard day, I have actually got three different “firsts” to report.

It started this morning when C. joined us at Pekip. How nice, being there together (and being able to talk to him about it afterwards). His opinion of it was pretty much the same as mine, so that was good as well. I have a tendency of not liking things, whereas C. goes into things with an open mind – so when he agrees with me in criticising something, I know I’m not being unfair.

Criticism is a good point to bring us to the second “first” of the day: I was shocked and saddened to see the headlines of many German papers this morning. Not only did they show pictures of the co-pilot who crashed Germanwings flight 4U9525 on Tuesday, but they even mentioned his full name. I feel so sorry for his family anyhow that I consider it a disgrace to direct the public anger at them in this way. However horrible his deed may have been (I am still shocked beyond words by it), I don’t think the public need to know about him in that much detail. So I wrote an email to the Munich paper that we subscribe to, telling them what I thought and cancelling the subscription. The new thing about this was the fact that I ended up having a bit of an email discussion with the deputy editor about it all. His argument was that the co-pilot was going to go down in history and that people therefore have a right to know his name. He even said he was inspired by my letter to write a comment about the whole issue in tomorrow’s edition. That will be interesting to read.

To get to something a bit more upbeat now, the third “first” for the day is the wild-garlic soup I’ve made for dinner. There aren’t many things that represent spring for me as much as wild garlic does. The smell, the flavour, the colour… I just love it! It grew in masses outside our house when I was little and we would just go and pick it fresh before dinner. So I was really happy when I discovered some at the shop this morning. The soup was very tasty and not actually too much work (blessed be the hand-held blender). And as every time I make soup, I promised myself I’d make soup more often from now on. It’s such a lovely thing – infinite possible recipes, that warm, cosy feeling it leaves in the belly and the fact that most soups are easy to cook more of and thus have dinner sorted for two or three days.